Conservation covenants on private land : issues with measuring and achieving biodiversity outcomes in Australia

Conservation covenants and easements have become essential tools to secure biodiversity outcomes on private land, and to assist in meeting international protection targets. In Australia, the number and spatial area of conservation covenants has grown significantly in the past decade. Yet there has been little research or detailed policy analysis of conservation covenanting in Australia. We sought to determine how conservation covenanting agencies were measuring the biodiversity conservation outcomes achieved on covenanted properties, and factors inhibiting or contributing to measuring these outcomes. In addition, we also investigated the drivers and constraints associated with actually delivering the biodiversity outcomes, drawing on detailed input from covenanting programs. Although all conservation covenanting programs had the broad aim of maintaining or improving biodiversity in their covenants in the long term, the specific stated objectives of conservation covenanting programs varied. Programs undertook monitoring and evaluation in different ways and at different spatial and temporal scales. Thus, it was difficult to determine the extent Australian conservation covenanting agencies were measuring the biodiversity conservation outcomes achieved on covenanted properties on a national scale. Lack of time available to covenantors to undertake management was one of the biggest impediments to achieving biodiversity conservation outcomes. A lack of financial resources and human capital to monitor, knowing what to monitor, inconsistent monitoring methodologies, a lack of benchmark data, and length of time to achieve outcomes were all considered potential barriers to monitoring the biodiversity conservation outcomes of conservation covenants.

Consent as a Common Law Defence to Non-Sexual Assaults: The Effect of Neal v The Queen

The following discussion is an exposition of the recognised exceptions to the general rule that the law will not sanction the giving of a lawful consent to the application or threat of actual or grievous bodily harm. The discussion will also focus on a series of decisions in the UK and Australia, particularly Neal v The Queen, that have altered the law's approach to these exceptions and, more importantly, now permit a personto give an informed consent to the risk of contracting HIV or any other sexually transmitted diseases, provided there was no intention on the part of the accused to actually infect the other person. The underlying rationale for sanctioning an informed consent to such a risk is that consenting adults should be accorded the utmost autonomy in conductingtheir private affairs, and particularly so in the context of the choices they make regarding their private sexual activities. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the notion of allowing one to lawfully consent to such a risk, it raises an important question as to the current status of the general rule that one cannot generally give an informed consent to the applicationor threat of actual or grievous bodily harm. More succinctly stated, if the law is prepared to allow an informed consent to the risk of contracting a potentially fatal disease, then what remains of what had previously been a well-settled rule that, save for a few well-recognised exceptions, persons were generally prohibited from consenting to the application or threat of actual or grievous bodily harm?

Deferentially private tagging recommendation based on topic model

Tagging recommender system allows Internet users to annotate resources with personalized tags and provides users the freedom to obtain recommendations. However, It is usually confronted with serious privacy concerns, because adversaries may re-identify a user and her/his sensitive tags with only a little background information. This paper proposes a privacy preserving tagging release algorithm, PriTop, which is designed to protect users under the notion of differential privacy. The proposed PriTop algorithm includes three privacy preserving operations: Private Topic Model Generation structures the uncontrolled tags, Private Weight Perturbation adds Laplace noise into the weights to hide the numbers of tags; while Private Tag Selection finally finds the most suitable replacement tags for the original tags. We present extensive experimental results on four real world datasets and results suggest the proposed PriTop algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving privacy. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.

The Great War In Victorian Private Life - Mildura

Join Dr Bart Ziino as he examines the private experience of the Great War in Victoria, drawing on personal letters and diaries to tell a story of the war as an individual, familial, and communal trial. Through an examination of anxieties over loved ones at the front, and tensions over who was bearing the greater burden. This talk offers new ways of understanding the costs of the war, the capacities of Victorians to meet and endure its demands, and its increasingly corrosive social effects within their communities.

‘Moral luck’ and the question of autonomy, choice, and control in end-of-life decision making

It is commonly assumed that, in the realm of ethical decision making at the end-of-life, ‘luck’ and ‘risk’ do not intrude. Nonetheless ‘moral luck’ (where happenstance makes a moral difference) does intrude and can have an unanticipated impact on the ultimate moral outcomes of end-of-life care. In the interests of upholding the ethical standards of end-of-life care, healthcare providers have increasingly relied on ethical principlism as a rational decision-guiding frame in the sincere belief that such an approach will enable patient selfdetermination and control over treatment decisions when needing end-of-life care. Due to contextual variables and associated uncertainties in end-of-life care, however, the intended moral outcomes of appeals to commonly accepted ethical principles (in particular the principle of autonomy) are not always realized. What is not always appreciated is that whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moral outcomes are achieved can be as much a matter of chance as of choice. This essay explores the relevance and possible implications of moral luck in end-of-life decision making and care. A key conclusion of the paper is that the notion of moral luck needs to be taken seriously in end-of-life care contexts since it can have an unanticipated impact on the outcomes of the decisions that are made and thereby on the moral interests of patients facing the end of their lives.

On the efficiency of private and state-owned enterprises in mixed markets

We examine oligopoly models of vertical product differentiation in which producing firms face variable costs of quality development. We show that comparing to private oligopoly, mixed oligopoly – whereby state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms coexist – enhances social welfare but reduces firms' profitability. We also demonstrate that Bertrand competition makes firms better off under mixed oligopoly but it makes firms worse off under private oligopoly compared with Cournot competition. These findings help to justify both the existence of SOEs and the efficiency of SOEs and private firms in mixed markets in transitional economies.

The impact of employee perceptions of organizational corporate social responsibility practices on job performance and organizational citizenship behavior: evidence from the Chinese private sector

This paper examines the impact of employee perceptions of organizational corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on their job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Hierarchical regression analysis on two-wave data from 184 supervisor/subordinate dyads from three organizations located in Zhejiang Province, South-East China, revealed that employee perceptions of CSR toward social and non-social stakeholders strongly influenced their OCB. However, employee perceptions of CSR toward employees, customers and government influenced neither their job performance nor OCB.

At home with the war: The Great War in Victorian private life. The 2014 Augustus Wolskel lecture

This article examines the Great War in Victoria through the lens of private sentiment. It exposes not only the diversity of perspectives and sentiment surrounding the war, but also the stresses endured by Victorians trying to reconcile their commitment to the war with personal and familial needs.Their experience was dominated by a confrontation with powerful currents of anxiety over the war and their loved ones, and increasing tensions within their communities over who was bearing the greater burdens of the war. Investigating private experience of total war at home allows us to see how Victorians made as well as endured the Great War, as their communities struggled to remain cohesive, and individuals struggled to cope with its demands.

War and private sentiment in Australia during 1915

This article investigates the development of a total war mentality in Australia during the First World War. Through a study of private letters and diaries, it observes the much greater level of popular commitment to the war that emerged in the middle of 1915, and an increasing acceptance throughout that year that the expanding war had taken on a life of its own, and that it would not end suddenly or without tremendous sacrifice. By the end of 1915, Australians were showing ever greater levels of dedication to a war offering increasingly less sense of how long it might continue.

Determinants of corporate capital structure: a comparison of public and private firms

 This thesis investigates how capital structure decisions of private and public firms in the UK differ in regards to their ownership structure, information asymmetry (proxied by audit quality) and access to debt capital.